I didn't spend a huge amount of time on the show floor of GDC this morning, but I did drop by twice so far today, and will probably go back at least once more. Good old Greg Kasavin found me and Jason waiting to get in and we had a nice little chat about view distances in RTS games. My opinion is that Universe at War was zoomed in too far for comfort, that I liked the flexibility of Supreme Commander, but that C&C3 was pretty much always perfectly playable.

　　Anyway, the show floor opened up and I hit Spore first off. After writing that up, I wandered around for a bit. This is my first GDC, so it's a bit of an odd experience compared to E3 and the Tokyo Game Show. The most obvious reason for this is that it's much less focused on games themselves than it is the process of making them. (It's also a bunch smaller.) There are a lot of booths dedicated to motion capture software (complete with guy in funky suit), special cameras, AI middleware, programming books, MMO world creation software, and so on and so forth. One booth is apparently already marketing some kind of spatial 3D program for the Wii that looks suspiciously like Johnny Chung Lee's popular Youtube demonstration.

　　So the show floor is pretty sedate so far; it seems like most of the big news will be coming out of the press conferences and the conference sessions themselves. My favorite news so far is from the Microsoft Community press conference. Apparently you'll be able to record videos of yourself playing Ninja Gaiden 2 at each save point, but if you want to upload these replays to XBL, you'll need to be ranked among the best players of the game. I don't know how strict this ranking system will be, but hopefully it'll be fairly restrictive. If anyone has ever searched Youtube for clips of Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, you'll have fond memories of finding clips of people playing terribly, or 10-second snippets of boring cutscenes, or whatnot. Hopefully a meritocracy will help separate the wheat from the chaff in Ninja Gaiden 2, at least for the XBLA clips. I just want to see people uploading clips of themselves killing bosses on the hardest difficult mode without getting hit at all; you can save your "ALMA IS SO HARD" clips for yourself.